zdl_cryptofandomcom-20200214-history
Theta Token (THETA)
Basics * The team raised $16 million in equity funding and launched Theta in Q2 2017. In Q3 2017, Theta completed an incredibly successful pre-sale of Theta tokens to strategic investors. A public ICO was scheduled for January 2018 but was cancelled partly from legal concerns. Theta was listed on exchanges starting January 17th. The team will start development of the Theta blockchain in Q1 2018 and plans to launch the blockchain in Q4. * Theta is a blockchain and token that will be used to power a decentralized video streaming and delivery network. The Theta Token functions as an incentive mechanism that encourages users to share their unused memory and bandwidth, serving as video caching and relay nodes for the network. Theta will be an open-source project that will be shared with industry and community participants, and our long-term vision is to have all video platforms participate in the network by building Dapp on top of the Theta protocol. Applications such as TV, movies, esports, music, education, and enterprise conferencing can benefit from building on the Theta Network. Theta ERC20-compliant tokens are live and fully integrated into the SLIVER.tv platform as of December 2017. The new native blockchain and protocol is planned to go live in Q4 2018, at which point each ERC20 token will be 1:1 exchanged for native Theta Tokens. * Currently, Theta ERC20 tokens are based on proof-of-work (PoW) and with the native blockchain is being built with a proof of stake consensus mechanism based on the Tendermint protocol. * “Theta’s caching nodes act as both miners and relayers of video. The more reliable its service and the more viewers the node serves, the great the rewards from mining a block. To implement this, Theta’s team has come up with two novel concepts they call Reputation Dependent Mining and Proof of Engagement. * Reputation Dependent Mining uses Proof of Engagement to calculate a miner’s “reputation”. Reputation is essentially the number of viewers that a miner serves and it essentially determines the miner’s rewards from mining a block. The more viewers a miner serves, the higher its reputation. * A miner increases its reputation by having its downstream viewers periodically compute “service certificates” to send back to the caching node. A service certificate is a simple Proof of Work puzzle that helps a miner attest to the rest of Theta’s network that the viewer is being served by the miner. If a viewer decides to stop computing service certificates for a miner, the miner can stop sending video to the viewer. If the miner doesn’t send video to a viewer, then it will be incredibly hard for the miner to convince anyone to compute service certificates for it. If it spends its own computing resources to generate service certificates, it will have less computing resources to create blocks.” http://storeofvalueblog.com/posts/a-deep-dive-into-theta/ * Theta’s technical solution is to build an off-chain micropayment pool to support ultra high transaction throughput required for a global video delivery and streaming network. One of the biggest challenges we identified when designing the Theta protocol is how to scale our native chain for ultra high transaction throughput. Although many blockchain projects are facing scaling problems, scaling for live video streaming is different and possibly even more complex. Existing level two scaling solutions like payment channels have various disadvantages when applied to the video streaming. We have designed and implemented an off-chain “Resource Oriented Micropayment Pool” that is purpose-built for video streaming. It allows a user to create an off-chain micropayment pool that any other user can withdraw from using off-chain transactions, and is double-spend resistant. It is much more flexible compared to off-chain payment channels. In particular, for the video streaming use case, it allows a viewer to pay for video content pulled from multiple caching nodes without on-chain transactions. By 6 replacing on-chain transactions with off-chain payments, the built-in “Resource Oriented Micropayment Pool” significantly improves the scalability of the blockchain. * micropayment records can be used as the “Proof-of-Engagement (PoE)”. With PoE, viewers can earn tokens as rewards from advertisers in exchange for their attention to video streams and by providing PoE. PoE not only brings benefits to viewers, but also to advertisers as it provides them with a reliable and verifiable engagement measurement of the delivered video streams. PoE can also be used as a basis to reward the content creators, which could be done automatically by the validators of the Theta blockchain since PoE can be inferred from the transaction records. Concerns: # If mining rewards are not enough to cover the costs of operating a miner, then there will be very few miners resulting in a poor CDN. # Will viewers want to watch Theta streams if it means they need to compute service certificates? Volatility in the value of Theta tokens might incentivize network participants like advertisers, streamers, and miners to hold onto Theta in as short a time period as possible in order to lock in income. # Volatility comes with risk whereas network participants are not investors and adverse to risk. # How will advertisers plug into the system? Will advertisers be incentivized to buy Theta or simply pay in fiat? Will streamers be willing accept Theta or simply get paid in fiat? # Will service certificates be enough to guarantee service quality? Service certificates are binary, either a viewer computes one or not. What if there’s gray area video quality issues like buffering and dropped frames? Team, etc. * Liu, Mitch; CEO / co-founder. Has been co-founder of three different companies before, one was Sliver.tv. BS in Computer Science & Engineering from MIT, MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business * Long, Jieyi; CTO / co-founder, also co-founder sliver.tv. BS in Microelectronics, Peking University, PhD in Computer Engineering, Northwestern University. Developed multiple patented technologies including VR live streaming as well as instant replays for video games. * 'Wes' * Theta Labs, Inc. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of SLIVER VR TECHNOLOGIES, Inc, both US Delaware C-Corp. Theta Labs is governed by the board of directors of SLIVER.tv and consists of founders Mitch Liu and Jieyi Long, and Dovey Wan, Managing Partner of Danhua Capital. SLIVER.tv, a leading esports entertainment platform has raised over $17MM in equity financing from Silicon Valley VCs, Hollywood media investors including Danhua Capital, DCM, Sierra, Advancit, Creative Artists Agency, BDMI, Greycroft and major corporations including Samsung and Sony * SLIVER.tv is the parent company of Theta Labs, Inc. and the leading esports live-streaming platform built around a virtual economy with more than 5 million unique monthly visits. The company is based in Cupertino, CA and backed by top-tier Silicon Valley VCs including Danhua Capital, DCM, Sierra Ventures, Venture Reality Fund, leading Hollywood/media investors including Creative Artists Agency, BDMI, Greycroft GC Tracker, Advancit Capital and top Japanese mobile gaming firms including GREE and Colopl. https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/assets.thetatoken.org/Theta-FAQ-latest.pdf * Strategic partners: DHCV, Sierra Ventures, DCM, The Venture Reality Fund, Gumi, IBC, Sparkland, ZP Capital, Nirvana Capital, Seraph, ZMT Capital, Heuristic Capital, Synapse Capital, aelf. * Company investors: DHCV, Sierra Ventures, DCM, The Venture Reality Fund, Colopl VR Fund, Gree, Green Pine Capital Partners, Sparkland, ZP Capital, Advancit, CAA, GreyCroft, BDMI, Heuristic Capital, Sony & Samsung * Media Advisory council: Samsung VR * Has a sh*t load of partnerships and advisors. Most notable are Sony, Samsung and a co-founder of Youtube Blockchain Advisors: * Guo, Chandler; Blockchain angel investor * Dakh, Steve; CTO at smartwallet. Steve Dakh was an original developer on the Ethereum project, co-founder and CTO of the KryptoKit team which launched the Rushwallet, and serves as an advisor to numerous blockchain projects such as Aeternity, Po.et, and Polymath. His current project is his most sophisticated wallet project yet, SmartWallet. Steve also serves on the Faculty of Advisors of the CryptoCurrency Certification Consortium (C4). * Skewers, Travis; Founder CoinMkt. Travis Skweres is an early entrepreneur and investor player in cryptocurrencies. Travis was the CEO and Cofounder of CoinMKT, one of the first Bitcoin exchanges based in the United States. Operating from 2013 - 2015, CoinMKT achieved tens of thousands of users, millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin traded, and was acquired by ANX Hong Kong in 2015. Travis remains an active investor in the cryptocurrency community and is currently working on releasing his next cryptocurrency-related project. Travis clients have included Occidental Petroleum, The Home Depot, Blinds.com, NBC Universal, and more. * Serrano, Sebastian; Founder Ripio. Sebastian Serrano is a young entrepreneur from Argentina. Starting as a skillful developer at a very early age and then leading a successful web & mobile development startup, Sebastian founded Ripio in 2013, offering Bitcoin wallet services plus credit payments for consumers and a full suite of financial services for merchants. With Ripio, Sebastian and his team aim to democratize digital payments in developing countries. * Haobo, Ma; CEO of aelf. Ma is the founder and CEO of aelf, a decentralized cloud computing blockchain network, as well as founder and CEO of Hoopox, a technology company that provides vertical industrial solutions from infrastructure to blockchain systems. A blockchain expert and early adopter of digital assets, Ma also previously served as CTO of GemPay and AllCoin. He is a member of Blockchain Experts’ Commission of Chinese Institute of Electronics. * Zhang, Shoucheng; Founder Danhua Capital * Shoucheng Zhang (Chinese: 张首晟; born 1963) is the JG Jackson and CJ Wood professor of physics at Stanford University. He is a condensed matter theorist known for his work on topological insulators,1 quantum spin Hall effect, spintronics, quantum Hall effect and high temperature superconductivity. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the Guggenheim fellowship in 2007, the Alexander von Humboldt research prize in 2009, the Europhysics prize in 2010, the Oliver Buckley prize in 2012, the Dirac Medal and Prize in 2012, the Physics Frontiers Prize in 2013, the “Nobel-class” Citation Laureates by Thomson Reuters in 20142 and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2015. He is identified as one of the top candidates for the Nobel Prize by Thomson Reuters in 2014.3 He has been elected as the member of the National Academy of Science in 2015. Mr. Zhang is also the founding chairman of Danhua Capital, a VC fund that invests primarily in early stage and growth stage company with disruptive technology/business model, big market and excellent team. * Zhang, Fan; Seqoia Capital China. Media advisors: * Chen, Steve; co-founder and old CTO of youtube * Kan, Justin; co-founder Twitch * Wick, Sam; a leading digital and entertainment executive. He currently leads UTA’s new venture group. He most recently was a key member of Maker Studios’ management team where he was responsible for the enterprise P&L, corporate development, business development and strategic partnerships. He has 20+ years of experience in the media and technology space including senior positions at MySpace, AOL, Mp3.com and Sony. During this time he was involved in M&A activity including financing and acquisitions of his companies. Category:Coins/Tokens